Perfect Day
by TrinityWildcat
Summary: Sometimes, not even all the love in the world can solve your problems. Sequel to Perfect End to an Awful Day.
1. Leaving New York

Perfect Day

"_It's pulling me apart…"_

Mechanically, I settled into my seat, running through my usual pre-flight checklist. Stow bag under seat in front, look around to orient yourself, steel yourself to block out other people's annoying noises. On a 747 red-eye special bound from New York to London Heathrow, that takes some doing. My companion wasn't helping. I doubt he was even aware he was singing under his breath.

"Leaving New York, never easy, I saw the lights fading out…" 

I glowered at him, but I doubted he noticed. I already wished the flight were over. Hours on end stuck in the same place, not even the chance to move and distract myself from bitter reality.

"It's easier to leave than to be left behind…" 

Suddenly, he seemed to remember exactly who he was sitting next to, and shut up. I doubted he could actually feel embarassment, but perhaps he was feeling whatever the equivalent was for him. That, or possibly the fact that I was having to screw my face up to stop myself from crying was clueing him in to the fact he'd just been exceptionally tactless. The jet taxied to the end of the runway, poised for take-off. I pressed my face against the glass; my companion, uncharacteristically silent, looked for something to read.

As the giant jet hurtled down the runaway and lifted itself into the air, I stared out of the window, watching New York drop away below me. Not an unfamiliar sight; over the past months it had become so familiar as to be almost homely. My eyes tracked the familiar sights on autopilot as we began to rise towards the cloud layers, the giant aircraft gaining speed, heeling over to the left, then the right, gracefully cutting through the late evening sky. I'd always taken comfort from these sights, thinking _That's my home_, then suddenly I realised what I was doing and, despite my best intentions, couldn't prevent my eyes from filling up.

I was looking for my… for Bobby's apartment. I always did that. Stupid, but when you fly away from someone you love, it's hard not to look behind you for one last reassuring glimpse. I leaned my head on the window glass and just let the tears come. It was going to happen at some point or other; better now than in another, less convenient time, regardless of the inconvenient presence of the person sat beside me.

I knew, I knew. I was going to have to adopt the motto "Never look back" if I wanted to survive over the next year or so. At least I wouldn't have much time to feel sorry for myself; this new post was going to take up all my time and energy.

Like my companion, I had a song stuck in my head. _Just a perfect day… I'm glad I spent it with you_…

I could still see him, standing in the park in that familiar brown suede jacket that fateful weekend. A perfectly ordinary day. A Saturday. His usual day for visiting his mother.

Looking back, I could see that in many ways, we'd both made far too much of it. But, equally, I could see no way that we could have avoided it. I reviewed the whole thing, from our first meeting on the Shorokogat surveillance operation - it seemed ages ago, but really it was just less than a year – to me moving in, to trying to learn to live with each other, to the final arguments that had led to me being on the red-eye special from New York to Heathrow. Not an unfamiliar flight to me, but this time it was different.

I couldn't repress a fresh wave of tears, no matter how hard I tried, at the thought that this time, there would be no phone calls from Bobby. No postcards, posted from him on the day I left, and from me on the day I arrived, in the hope that they _might_ get there before I returned to him. No saving his email in my inbox all day as a little treat for when I needed it. Even after I moved to New York, I'd still sometimes needed to travel. It had been a feature of our relationship, our own little ritual. I left, and we missed each other, and then I came back, and…

There was no way we could have avoided it. All the love and companionship we'd shared hadn't been able to prevent the question "When will I meet your mother?" becoming the litmus test for our relationship.

_Weekenders on our own… it's such fun_…

Partly it had been the way I'd found out. Bobby and I had been happy, more or less, for the first few months. Then one case, more than any other, had affected him. I'd done my best to help him deal with it, but if I gave him space to handle it on his own, it felt like I was abandoning him. If I tried to offer comfort, I got the overwhelming impression that I was just adding "reassure Sienna" to the mental list of "Things I Have To Deal With" in his head. In desperation, I'd tried taking Alex Eames out for drinks in the hope of gathering information.

I squirmed inside. I still wasn't proud of that. I'd deliberately waited until her defences were down, until her new boyfriend, Steve Vallis, had returned to Britain on a half-year's secondment to his consultancy's London office. I'd picked a time just after she and Bobby had been tackling a particularly soul-destroying case; a man who'd faked his own death to cover his running off with his new mistress. I'd once heard a saying "Do right, though heaven falls". Neither of us knew about heaven, but in this case "doing right" on Bobby and Alex's part had led to the man's wife and young family losing both their husband and father, _and_ his life-insurance payoff. I knew from Bobby that he and Eames weren't getting along too well, one of those down patches that affects every long-term relationship, whether personal or professional. Combine a general feeling of being pissed at the world with a specific feeling of being pissed at one's partner, and a large amount of alcohol, and I'd got the whole story about the case of the schizophrenic doctor in denial, its effect on Bobby and the reason why.

Which had left me in a quandary. I'd known for a while that Bobby's mother was in a home for the mentally ill – I could hardly avoid knowing, since he went to see her every weekend – but he'd always left the details vague and I'd not pressed him for them, figuring that he'd tell me in his own good time. Not wanting to risk messing up Alex and Bobby's working relationship, I kept asking as tactfully as I could, until one weekend I asked him flat out "Would you like me to come with you?", and, when he'd replied that he preferred to visit her alone, replied "Why?" and made it clear I wasn't going anywhere until he told me.

I sighed, recalling his answer and the flat, neutral tone of voice he'd used. _My mother has paranoid schizophrenia. She tends to be made unhappy by any changes in routine, and it takes her a while to get used to strangers._ Knowing what I did – what Alex had told me – I knew that that was barely scratching the surface of what that meant to him; effectively, the loss of much of his childhood and the wrecking of his family. I knew now why he'd gone into the army; as a form of escape. Something I could relate to, a little.

After all, I'd gone to college as far away from my family as I could manage and still stay in the States, escaped to Europe to go travelling, then stayed there working for Interpol, nominally because I wanted to broaden my knowledge of the world, but really so I could escape my father's well-intentioned enquiries about when I was going to join the family business. I'd never managed to work out the right way to say that there was no way on earth I saw myself as an oil company executive, no matter how fondly he might dream of me as the next family CEO.

Fondly… that was the problem. My childhood had been fundamentally happy and I'd grown up expecting to be loved. Not good preparation for living with a man who'd been responsible for his mother for nearly all of his life, whose father had left his wife and two sons, whose brother had willingly dropped the burden of caring for their sick mother onto Bobby's broad shoulders. I tried desperately to understand, researching schizophrenia during the approximately one spare hour I had during the week when I wasn't working, eating, sleeping or trying desperately to keep our relationship going.

_Just a perfect day… You made me forget myself…_

Once I'd known that, the whole tenor of our relationship changed. Lying unspoken between us was the knowledge that Bobby would only risk upsetting his mother by introducing a new woman in his life to her if he intended to make the relationship permanent. I never asked again to see her… at least, not out loud. But with Bobby it wasn't enough simply not to say things, and I was never good at hiding my feelings from him, the traitorous little thought every time I waved him off on his weekly visits, _Why am I not good enough for you to introduce to her? Am I just someone nice and convenient? Someone to warm your bed, laugh at your jokes, but not good enough for you to rely on, open up to, trust with your feelings?_

We both avoided talking about it, which inevitably led to shouting about it, during a horrible phase when the least little thing wrong set one of us off; me screaming and yelling, him coldly rational and terrifying. It was during those periods I began to understand the rumours I'd always ignored, the nicknames I'd cheerfully dismissed as being the derision of people who didn't know him properly;_ Goren, the manipulator. Goren, the headfucker. Goren, the bully._

It was during that time that my distress at home combined with problems at work and caused me to look into other career possibilities. My relationship with Bobby prevented my team from working with Major Case, which meant that we were prevented from tackling some of the more challenging cases that my department dealt with. This did not make me popular, although it hadn't stopped me being promoted to assistant team leader.

Then a contact of mine in London (currently sitting beside me as the plane leveled out over the Atlantic) happened to mention that Interpol was looking for a senior liaison officer to promote good relations between itself and the British Metropolitan police's intelligence-gathering and serious crime divisions, with an emphasis on tackling criminal organisations from Russia and Eastern Europe; my specialty. It represented a serious promotion; I'd have my own team to lead and some very important cases to tackle.

I'd applied for the post without telling Bobby, feeling alternatively guilty and justified as he withdrew from me further. Then came another case that seemed to distress him, to get through the carefully-cultivated shell he'd grown to survive in his job, causing him to withdraw to the extent that even when we made love it seemed as though he was somewhere else.

Cue another drunken night out with Alex Eames; another session where I very carefully drew out from her the details of what was bothering him. Not as hard to do as you might think; Alex would never spill any details that might affect a case in any way whatsoever, even when she was drunk, which wasn't often. But in our own ways, the two of us loved him, and hated to see him suffer, and it wasn't too hard to play on that a little, in the shared hope that one of us might get through to him. It was what she reported that Bobby had said that finally opened my eyes.

_There was this guy – he hid the fact that hereditary Alzheimer's ran in his family. His son had it. He knew he'd given it to his son, but didn't tell him. Bobby was furious, kept yelling that he'd played Russian roulette with his children's futures…_

That song played in my head again… _drink sangria in the park, then later, when it gets dark, we go home…_ Miserably, I recalled that weekend two weeks ago in perfect clarity.

I'd been offered the post I'd applied for on Friday, and said that I would confirm I'd take it on Monday. That Saturday morning was bright and clear, and the two of us went for a walk together, me doing my usual trot to keep up with his long strides. He'd wandered off to a refreshment stall to buy us both a drink, when a tiny blond girl – she couldn't have been more than two, probably younger – toddled up to me, crying. I dropped down to my knees, making the "Sssh! What's wrong?" noises that even the most clueless adult instinctively makes when trying to comfort a crying child.

I'd managed to get her to stop crying by picking up the teddy bear she'd dropped and pretending to make it dance, but I'd been no nearer to solving why she was crying when Bobby arrived. He crouched down beside me and I watched in amazement as he made a series of odd signing gestures. I was about to ask how he'd guessed she was deaf, when a loud yell of "Anne-Marie! Where are you?" came from behind us and the child's frantic father dashed up, clutching another tiny child to his chest and looking desperately relieved. The little girl immediately screamed "Daddy!" and dashed off to cling on to his leg whilst he scolded her for wandering off whilst he was busy with her brother, in the way of all relieved parents who've just found their missing child. The two of us watched as the little family wandered off into the park, the child's father calling out "Thank you for looking after her, I'm really… _no Anne-Marie, don't suck that, it's been on the floor_!" over his shoulder.

"What was that?" I'd asked.

"Baby signing. It's popular among parents right now. A very young child has better motor control than verbal skills when they first start to develop the ability to communicate; it's a way of speaking with them whilst they're still learning to articulate words. She was trying to tell me she'd lost her daddy." He paused, then in answer to my unspoken question, replied "Came in useful on a case once."

And then I'd seen it. Seen what was really wrong with the two of us. Bobby was staring intently, almost hungrily, after the family, and, having spoken to Alex Eames, I suddenly understood why.

_He wouldn't stop yelling that the man had played Russian roulette with his children's futures_.

There was the reason why Bobby had never married. Had never once mentioned the possibility of it to me.

I'd left him in peace to do jobs around the apartment and visit his mother, whilst I went off on my own, supposedly to shop, but really to spend the rest of the day thinking about that. That, and one of the facts I'd come across in my research into his mother's illness; _schizophrenia has a genetic element, and this may sometimes be passed on from parent to child_.

Later that night, after Bobby returned from his visit (looking calm; obviously his mother had been having one of her better days), we'd gone out for a late meal together and I'd told him, as neutrally as I could, the details of the post I'd applied for and that I'd been offered it on a year's contract to begin with. Then I'd stopped.

I'd been intended to follow that up with "And I think this will give us both some breathing space, but I want us to keep seeing each other, because I love you, Bobby, and I don't want to lose you," but the words had dried up in my throat at his expression.

Relief.

His next words had confirmed that. "It sounds as though you won't have much time for travelling."

"No… no, I won't."

"I can't easily get away at weekends."

It had taken every inch of my self-control not to scream "Yes, go on, hide behind your mother!" Then I'd looked in his face and seen something that killed all my anger. Not relief anymore. Just acceptance. The same face I'd seen him wear before, when a case didn't quite work out right. The face of, _Well, that's how life works out. Time to move on_. The anger had gone, and I felt as though part of me had just been cut away. What was the point, if he felt like that? I couldn't force me into wanting me to stay. I couldn't force him into talking about how between us we could afford the airfare for me to come visit at weekends. If he didn't want that, what was the point?

"No. I know that."

"I wish you the best of luck. When do you start?"

I'd put on my professional mask, and hidden behind it for the rest of the evening. I could do this. I was an adult. Adults are in control of their feelings. "In two weeks' time – they asked specially for me to start early."

"Sounds like they want you pretty badly."

"Yes – I have the experience and the language skills, not many people have that."

"I'm happy for you. It's a great opportunity."

And that had been the rest of our evening, apart from a mutual exchange of _Sorry, I'm too tired tonight/that's alright, I understand_. Again, a fresh rill of tears ran down my face. If I'd known that our brief time together a month ago on the couch in Bobby's apartment, both of us tired after a long day at work and a long night out with Alex and Steve, trying desperately to escape the atmosphere in the apartment and get back to how things normally were, would be our last time together, I'd have made it… more special. It had been one of those quick sessions when both of us had simply looked at each other and thought "Right here, right now, let's get it on and worry about finesse another time". Back when I still thought we'd have another time.

The days since then had flown by in a whirl of arrangements. Normally, our busy lives had never stopped us making time for each other, but we'd both taken refuge in them as an excuse not to have to talk. Bobby couldn't have been more helpful, more supportive, as I once more uprooted my entire life and tried to transfer it to another country.

I'd tried, but couldn't stop myself thinking _It's as if he can't wait to see the back of me_.

Then, before I knew it, the last few days. Last round of drinks with my old colleagues, last farewell to Alex, last night in the apartment that had been my home for what had been the happiest year of my life.

Last night with him.

We'd spent it simply walking the city, not talking, supposedly so that I could say farewell to it. Oh, we'd been so mature, so reasonable, so _accepting_ of how life could turn out this way.

Another wave of tears struck me. The cabin crew were moving between the aisles now, handing out meals. Faintly, from a long way off, I heard a faint enquiry _Is your friend alright?_ and my companion's tactful reply _She's moving from one side of the Atlantic to another – I think the stress has just caught up with her_. The voices murmured on; I lost interest.

Truth be told, I was grateful to the cabin crew, to the other passengers, even to my companion, who had been tactfully pretending to be interested in the in-flight magazine for the past half-hour, because if it wasn't for them I'd have no reason not to break down in tears and howl until I lost my voice. Bobby would never now know what I had been going to tell him that night, what I'd decided during the afternoon I'd spent weighing up my options.

The thought still tortured me. Should I have said it? Should I have ignored his obvious relief at the news that I was leaving him, and just told him anyway what I'd been thinking? But I could still see the look on his face. If my leaving was truly what he wanted, then why torture him? I clearly didn't have whatever it would take to reassure him. I could only conclude that what I'd once screamed at him, that he secretly thought me an immature child, had been in essence correct. Better this way for both of us, perhaps. Perhaps he would find someone else. Someone whose life hadn't been happy, someone who'd suffered as he had and who could perhaps ease him as I could not, someone who had experience of what it was like to grow up unhappy and with your childhood taken from you all too soon.

In the midst of grief, we are in indignity; my thoughts were interrupted as my backside ached over the injection site. I rubbed it idly, and shifted. In truth, I almost hadn't bothered to get my usual contraceptive shot before I left; what was the point? But then, an unexpected pregnancy would have been the final straw in an awful series of months. I looked down to where my hand rested on my stomach. Nothing growing there. Empty.

Maybe I would find another man. But for now, I could think only of the future and of my duties in my new career if I was going to survive.

I wiped my eyes, and turned to find my companion holding out a tissue. I took it gratefully and began to tidy myself up.

"It can certainly hit you, when you have to leave somewhere special to you behind," he ventured. I guessed this was his version of tact. "Or at least, so I understand; I've traveled a lot, but I've always considered London to be my home."

I gave him the best smile I could manage. "You're lucky."

"Yeah, I am. And, so will you be. You're going to love London." He held out a miniature vodka. I stared at it, wondering if it was a good idea.

"They say one of those things is equal to three on the ground," I replied, trying desperately to get my voice back under control and stop the juddery, post-crying gasps I couldn't avoid making. I took the drink and sipped it, hoping it would help.

He grinned, a familiar shark's-grin. "Yes. Excellent, isn't it? Saves so much money. Now, shall we talk business?"

"Why not?" I replied. I wasn't going to sleep too much, that was for sure.

"Great." He reached in his briefcase for some papers, and paused. "You know, this is going to be great for you. I know you don't like trading on your translation skills, but seriously, no-one but you could fill this post. They interviewed ten people for it, did you know?"

"Actually, yes I did. I had the mixture of linguistic skills and experience they were after," I replied, slipping briefly into my making-the-pitch-in-the-interview mode. Have to watch that in future; it made me appear nervous.

"The hell with experience… well, not completely, but it's not just that. You have the connections; that's what they were after."

"Like you always say, that's how the game is played," I replied, taking grateful comfort in being able to speak to him like this.

"It is indeed. In fact, there's someone I'd like you to meet as soon as you've settled in…"

"Not _another_ of your vaguely dodgy friends on the force?"

"They're not all dodgy. Some are actually corrupt. Kidding! No, she's someone quite different…"

I allowed myself one further look part at the patch of anonymous cloud hiding New York from me, then dropped the blind down to block out the night and turned my face to the future. I would survive. I only hoped Bobby would too. _Goodbye, my love_.


	2. I Remember Her Face

"_You're going to reap, just what you sow..."_

That song was playing again. It was a new tape of background music – he'd realised that when he noticed an unfamiliar song from last's week top ten playing when he walked in – but whoever was responsible for background music in his local grocery store was just as much of a Lou Reed fan as ever. He wandered the aisles of the grocery store, not really seeing what he was looking at, operating on auto-pilot, occasionally checking the crumpled list in his right hand and trying to tune out the sounds in the background. Could have ordered online, of course, but sometimes it was good to get out of the apartment. Then again, he'd hardly spent any time in there this past week or so.

As he hunted for orange juice, Bobby Goren found himself reflecting on the events of the past week. Work at least was going well, he thought. He and Eames were working well together again, and once again he reflected on how much he'd hate to be parted from her, her instinctive knowledge of exactly what to say and when and how, her ability to anticipate where he was going, clarify his thoughts, add her own insights... He'd depended on that a lot over the past few days, when he'd been sunk deep in his work, single-mindedly focussing on it with an intensity unusual even for him. But then, he thought, it had been an _extremely_ complex case involving three murders and a contested will. Due to her being first on the scene at the first murder, he and Eames had been working a lot with another detective, Lynn Bishop.

He smiled wryly at the memory. Had _he_ ever been quite that nervous, quite that scared stiff, quite that earnest? Maybe once, a long time ago, but not for years. Bishop was undoubtedly bright and capable – definitely showed promise as a Major Case detective – but working with her for the past week had been an excellent reminder of exactly why Alex Eames was his perfect partner. Funny how she seemed keen that he and Bishop got along well. He hoped to God that didn't mean Eames was planning to move on somewhere else and was lining up her replacement. Nah, he'd know. He'd spot it, surely?

Anyway, he thought with a sigh of relief, that case was nearly concluded. No more having to work with Bishop, whose red hair and elegant figure reminded him of... no. They were both young and keen and red-headed, but there the similarities between Lynn Bishop and Sienna Tovitz ended. Where Bishop was earnest, Sienna was humorous. Where Bishop was pale, beautiful and elegant, Sienna was freckled, pleasant-faced and enticingly curvy and rounded beneath the suits she favoured for work. Where Bishop's professional insecurities showed, Sienna masked hers with an outward show of confidence and good cheer, except when they were alone together and she needed him...

He reminded himself firmly that that was in the past. The best solution had happened for both of them. As he passed the publications aisle, he stopped to scan a couple of the newspapers in search of distraction. It never hurt to be up on current affairs. Unfortunately, a quick scan of the first few pages reminded him of a cartoon he'd once seen of a newspaper front page with the headlines "Oil prices rises," "Trouble in Middle East," "Doctors warn of new health risk," "Famine in Africa," "Dull political controversy rumbles on," and the caption "Generic News for sale: you'll never need to buy another newspaper again!"

Bored, he folded it prior to putting it back on the stand, then stopped as his eye was caught by a headline at the bottom of the fourth page: "Mystery Illness Baffles Doctors." A short news article, it described a woman with minor connections to one of the big players on the New York art scene (who was blond and with model-quality looks, hence the inclusion of the item and photograph, he suspected), who had been sick in hospital for days with baffling symptoms, apparently from a rare animal virus. He shrugged and folded the paper. Odd case, but nothing that fell under his field of responsibility.

"_I made a point to burn all of the photographs..."_

The background music played on, getting into his mind despite his best attempts to block it out. It was a new song he'd heard once before, called "Whatsername," couldn't quite remember the artist, a sad tune of loss and regret...

"_She went away and then I took a different path..." _

He tried desperately to ignore it, but trying to block out the song brought another voice into his head, a female voice, pleasant, light, with a very slight Russian inflection.

"There are two things I need to talk to you about."

For the first time since she'd left, he suddenly remembered Sienna saying that on that fateful evening, her voice floating persistently through his head despite his good intentions to put the past behind him and move on. What had been the other thing, he thought? The first had been her new job offer, but what was the other?

No use in thinking about that now, he thought sternly. She'd made her decision, and he ought to respect that, so whatever it was, she must have thought better of it. Involuntarily, an image of her face floated into his face; Sienna, wearing the expression he'd come to know so well over the past couple of months, that horrible neutral expression that meant she was desperately upset and confused, but doing her best to stay rational.

He winced, unable to shake the crushing feeling of guilt that expression always caused in him, the knowledge that he had put that unhappiness there. When she'd announced she'd been offered a job in London, his first feeling had been of relief, that he'd never see that expression again, never make her unhappy again. Throughout the whole of that awful evening less than three weeks ago, and the two short weeks that had followed until she had caught her flight to London and left New York for good, he'd done his best to be calm, supportive, rational when, if he was being honest, all he'd wanted to do was plead with her to stay, not to leave him.

But he couldn't help being who he was, he thought unhappily. Couldn't change his past or who it had made him, any more than Sienna could change who she was. He couldn't change himself, but he could at least not be selfish, let her go, move on to a better man, someone her own age who could make her happy.

_That was her choice to make, not yours_, a voice at the back of his head whispered.

_She applied for a job in London. What else could that mean?_

_A last-ditch desperate effort to make you think about how much you wanted her, about how you had to do something about the situation instead of letting it drag on?_ the voice continued.

He shook his head, angrily. Pointless to speculate in that way now. Sienna had made her decision, and he supported it. It had been a happy few months with her, and eventually they'd both look back on it, smile fondly, and then forget about it.

As he neared the end of his shopping trip, he veered towards the canned fruit section on autopilot, thinking of dessert at the end of the week. It was a shame, he thought, the recipe he was thinking of tasted a lot better if you used real oranges, not canned segments, but Sienna for some reason didn't like real oranges. She would eat them – like him, she'd acquired the traveller's knack of eating whatever was in front of her and smiling – but she didn't really like them, and he didn't see the point in making something she didn't like.

Then it hit him. He could. He could use real oranges.

She wouldn't be there to object.

He closed his eyes briefly, gripping the grocery cart's handle firmly to hold himself steady. The future stretched out before him, and for the first time he really realised what that meant; _no more Sienna_. No more mornings in bed waking up to her snuggling up to him with that wicked smile, no more nights staying out later exploring the city than either of them should really stop out when they had work to do tomorrow, no more evenings when he'd come home to find her there. Not having the comfort of knowing that she would be there at the end of his day, a warm breathing body curled close against him.

Not even having the odd comfort of comforting her, of helping her through her learning curve and the struggles she was having to adapt to her new career, and the private joy he felt as he saw her grow into it before his eyes, turning into the woman he knew she could be. Not having the satisfaction, after days spent wrangling with difficult cases, to have a simple problem – Sienna in need of him – with a simple solution – be there for her and hold her.

Life had battered at him – those cases that had dragged all his personal demons to the fore – and he'd sunk back into his old ways of dealing with it, unwilling to risk letting Sienna help him. Worse still, he'd inflicted the worst side of his personality on her, for fear she might actually see that underneath, her rock, her loving strong Bobby, was just as scared and unhappy as she herself. How had that made her feel? The thought was like a knife twisting slowly in his flesh, torturing him now that it was too late to make amends. He knew only too well how that had made her feel; young, inexperienced and foolish, the last way he would ever want her to think of herself.

Agonisingly, the truth of her accusation in their last fight hit him. Truly, he _had_ judged her. Had judged her too young, too inexperienced, to deal with him at his worst. He'd never thought of himself as a coward... but he'd acted like one. Decided that he'd prefer the martyr's choice of keeping it to himself, pretending he was sparing her, but if he dug deeper into his motivations, he had to admit that really, he'd done that because he couldn't face having her fail to help him and leave.

Better never to give her that chance, than to give it to her and _know_ that she couldn't cope, if, indeed, she _had_ proven unable to deal with him in his blackest, worst moods. Perhaps she would have been able to. He'd not know now, because he'd never given her the chance to prove it.

If he had done one thing right, he thought with a wince, it was that he had managed to let her go without inflicting more pain on her with useless protestations of love, of need. She had made her choice, and he'd respected it.

Would ever he see her again? Meet her again, perhaps in the line of work, and see that wonderful smile just for a few seconds, before their professionalism took over and she vanished again. (Would she take the new-found sexual confidence their relationship had given her and take full advantage of all the opportunities London offered? The thought of her with someone else... no, that was too painful, right now.)

He realised he'd been looking at the oranges for a long time, and decided he didn't really feel like dessert anyway. Decided, thinking _If I have real oranges, I eat knowing she won't be back... if I have the canned ones, I eat wishing she was here..._ An automaton, he moved towards the checkout, blindly groping for his wallet, not seeing anything but Sienna's face in front of him, already receding, becoming a memory instead of a part of his life.

She'd have finished moving in and be just about to start her first week in her new job now, he thought painfully, as he paid for the goods and went in search of his car. Uselessly, he wished he had gone with her to the airport. Oh, they'd both agreed out loud that there was no point in him taking time off work to do that, not with the seriousness of the case he was working on (though Eames had said twice that she could manage without him, with an expression of concern he'd done his best to ignore), they could say their goodbyes perfectly well at home before she left...

He knew now that he'd been deceiving himself. He'd not gone with Sienna because he couldn't trust himself not to beg her to stay, and she didn't deserve having her life screwed up like that. After all he'd done to her, he owed her at least the chance to start over without complications.

As his vision blurred, he pulled over, recognising that he was not in any fit state to drive at present. Switching off the engine and lights, he rested his arm on the wheel, and dropped his head into his hands, rocking backwards and forwards. He recognised now that the pain had to be faced, had to be gone through before he could heal. Before he could stop it, the image he'd been fighting swam up before him, the one that he'd seen once in a dream filled with longing and which had heralded the end of his and Sienna's relationship.

_...Sienna with a tiny red-haired bundle in her arms, glowing with happiness... nearby, he could hear Eames' voice murmuring softly "He's _perfect_, Bobby, just beautiful"... whilst the two of them, _his family_, looked up at him as he held them both, arms wrapped around her, his love, and their child..._

_No_, he cried, a long silent wail inside his head. No. He could never have done that to her, risked giving her child the tendency towards the same illness that had destroyed his childhood and his mother's personality. Moreover, he could not have done it to himself, could not have lived with himself if they _had_ risked it and he had been responsible for passing it on. The past couple of months had been both wonderful and agonising. Wonderful, because he and Sienna had come to love each other, and agonising, because he had increasingly seen it in her face. Seen her become increasingly fascinated by children, turning to look at them, watch them, cooing over babies, and then she would look at him, never saying anything, but it was so obvious what she was thinking. How could he possibly tell her that on the one hand, he would like nothing better for their future, and on the other, that they should never have children together? Better that she had gone, moved on with her life.

As he wiped his eyes and tried to compose himself, the song from the grocery store was still stuck in his head, the singer's regret in every word, _"I remember the face, but I can't recall the name... now I wonder how whatsername has been_."

He would never forget Sienna's name, or her face, the one woman he'd seriously thought of... no. He would not allow himself to think that, and he angrily wiped his hand across his eyes, thinking of her one last time, picturing her as he always liked to think of her when he needed cheering up; Sienna in army fatigues with that nervous, shy smile, the one that he and he alone could so easily cause to broaden into a glad smile of welcome and love. Wherever she was now, he hoped that she would find the happiness and fulfilment she deserved, and though he knew she'd not know it, he sent her his love and hope for her future.

FIN

**Author's Note**: I don't own the copyright to any of the songs or lyrics quoted here. For reference, they're: "Leaving New York" by REM, "Perfect Day" by Lou Reed and "Whatsername" by Green Day.

I'm now going on holiday, so there will be a long pause before I post any more fics, but don't worry, this isn't my last Criminal Intent fic, not by a long shot.


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